


to catch a thief

by badraph



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Relationship Study, everything i touch turns to dick character studies, ft lightly implied ndn jason cause i just love forcing my hcs on people, ugly duckling jason todd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-29 14:31:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13929042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badraph/pseuds/badraph
Summary: He's forced to realize, now, that his mental picture of Jason has beenseriouslyoutdated for a while now.





	to catch a thief

Dick's got a list of all the things he'd fix if he somehow found himself blown back in time and knew for a fact that tweaking the timeline in this specific way wouldn't blow the universe apart. It's a very specific scenario, he knows, but he ends up reviewing every event one by one near daily.

The fact that he only spent a few measly hours with Jason Todd before he had the life and childhood glee beat out of him sits damn near number one.

He thought he'd have more _time_ , his brain always always hurries to defend, though Dick isn't sure to who. It only serves to make him think about how it could've been if Dick had gotten over himself and not held the kid at arms length due to his association with Bruce and Dick's lingering anger with the man, how it could've been if they'd actually _had_ more time. They could've been great. They could've been close. They could've been brothers.

Sometimes, in the aftermath of a disaster averted, in the few moments when the dust is settling and they're all together without having to fight for their lives, he sees Jason lingering near the fringes, catches him staring, for just a moment, at Cass or Steph or Babs or Tim as they throw their arms around each other or otherwise celebrate the victory with the familiarity their ragtag little clan has come to have with each other, and he thinks Jason might be choked by the same what-ifs.

They'd been nothing when Jason was there, nothing close to resembling even the most dysfunctional excuse for a family. Dick was an open wound in those days—the slightest mention of Bruce had him seeing red, the thought of even joking about their relationship as something familial as he so often used to just to watch Bruce squirm at the implications leaving a bad taste in his mouth for hours after. If he hadn't had Babs, he might have gone insane, though he realizes, now, having her with him then took her away from Bruce and, by extension, away from Jason, too.

Dealing with Bruce alone and at his moodiest must've been a _nightmare_ , but it's only in retrospect that Dick really feels the sympathy pangs. He'd been too full up with betrayal and what he _knew_ was misplaced anger to see anything but a living breathing reminder of everything he had to leave behind when Bruce all but kicked him to the curb.

He knew it wasn't Jason's fault— _knew_ he couldn't possibly know the ins and outs of the complicated relationship he'd unknowingly waltzed into the middle of, but Dick was stupid and angry, and Jason picked up on Dick's icy demeanor despite his attempts to mask it the shamefully singular time that they ended up working together for a night.

“You don't, like, want your old job back, do you?” His lips fit clumsily over the braces in his mouth that hadn't been there the last time Dick saw him. On anyone else, he might've found it endearing—cute in the same pitiful sort of way he tended to find the annual ugly dog contest downtown—but Jason wasn't just anyone. He sucked in sharply to draw back all the excess saliva in a mouth still unaccustomed to being full of metal, and _Disgusting_ , snarled some nasty, intrusive thing from one of the cruelest corners of his brain.

Dick tried not to let the wince show on his face because, god, he was letting his animosity toward his estranged mentor get so out of hand that he was being malicious toward a teenager's physical appearance for just associating with him. That wasn't him, not at all, but it was obvious from one look at how he carried himself that Jason was self conscious, and Dick had been taught to seek out and strike at weaknesses his entire life. It was a knee-jerk response to hit a threat where it hurt, but Jason was _far_ from a threat and he didn't deserve that kind of unwarranted abuse, no matter how much Dick was projecting onto him.

 _So snap_ out _of it,_ he ordered himself firmly, and turned his kindest smile on Jason.

“Of course not,” he assured. “You're doing a fantastic job,” and the way it made Jason's face light up only served to make the guilty pit in his stomach feel about fifty feet deeper. He ran a hand through his hair with a sigh and chewed on an idea until the silence between them threatened to turn sour.

“After we catch these guys,” he started, smiling when Jason's bored, slouched form perked up at his voice, “what's say I show you the best spot in the city to watch the sunrise? One not even Bruce knows about?”

Jason grinned again, all crooked teeth and metal. “Sounds great!”

But then Bruce showed up and dragged Jason off before they ever actually got around to it, but he threw Dick another smile over his shoulder as he went.

“Next time!” he said, and Dick nodded with a slight laugh.

“Next time.”

They never got around to that, either.

 

* * *

 

In this line of work, people usually turn out to be either a little bit evil, a little bit crazy, or a little bit both. Dick's still trying to figure out where on that Venn Jason falls because he's _definitely_ edging on at least one of them.

“I didn't put a hand on or a bullet in any of them,” Jason assures when Dick finds him on top of a building adjacent to where the paramedics are scrambling to gather up the few remaining survivors that couldn't run out the doors, still pouring out a quickly thinning stream of smoke, themselves. His tone is a bit too cheery to be good news or truth. “Honest.”

“Obviously,” Dick says, crossing his arms as he takes a place at the edge of the roof next to him. “Shooting them after they'd been burned alive seems would've just been overkill.” He pauses. “Literally, I guess.”

Jason snorts, and Dick feels a bit of ill advised hope for civility when he makes no move to attack or run. Hopeful, not stupid. He watches Jason carefully from the corner of his eye in the few seconds of silence that follow, anticipating all manner of attacks but taking care, for once, with Jason, not to provoke them. He keeps his movements pointedly slow and cautious, keenly aware of being watched just as closely as he's watching.

Jason just sighs. “That's a school down there,” he says. “Did you know that? An elementary school.”

Dick did, but he gets the feeling Jason's not really looking for an answer. He doesn't nod, just listens.

“They rigged the sprinklers to spit out gas and spark. Everywhere but the security room. Wanted to watch, I guess.” Jason tilts his head back to look down his nose at one of the badly burned men being loaded into the back of an ambulance. Dick follows his gaze, feeling somehow even less sympathetic than he had before. “Automatic locks on all the doors in case of a shooter. Very high tech stuff. When I was a kid, they just told us to jump out a window or something.”

“Mind telling me how that turned into this?” he asks even though he already has a pretty good idea, motioning at the scene below them, all the drenched schoolchildren huddled out of sight of the charred bodies being wheeled out of the main doors.

Jason hums, his stiff posture going so casual and loose as he turns to face Dick, he can hear the sarcasm in his tone before he even speaks. “I haven't the faintest,” he says. “I guess they got their wires crossed somehow and ended up only turning their creeproom into a deep fryer.” He shrugs. “Cosmic irony, I guess.”

“I'm sure,” Dick says. “And you just happened upon the scene?”

“What luck, right? Maybe all my good karma's finally paying off.”

“I think the fact that you consider watching people burn to death a reward exempts you from having good karma.” He purses his lips at the hand Jason dramatically slaps over his heart.

“ _Harsh_ ,” he says. “Are you saying you don't _trust_ me, Dick?” He only twitches a little at his name spoken so openly. “Because, you know, all I've ever wanted was to be accepted by you—by all of you! I'm tryin' oh so hard to get back into pa's good graces, and the idea that you'd accuse me of something so horrendous after I've all but sworn myself back onto your _obviously_ superior code of ethics, well,” he pats at his chest again, “it stings. Right here.”

“See, you had a good thing going with the Little House on the Prairie approach, but I feel like you kinda lost it at the end, there. Four out of ten.” He watches Jason carefully as he laughs, looking him over for some kind of tell of something—anything. “Is this gonna be your thing now? Pretending you're adhering to Bruce's rules and running around burning people alive when he's not looking?”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Jason says. “I'd never pretend to adhere to his bullshit code.” He hops down from the edge of the building and tilts his head. “And I _dare_ you to find some proof that I was involved in this.”

“If there's something to find,” Dick calls after him as he turns and begins to head off, “I'll find it.”

He can't see Jason for the helmet, of course, but his smug expression may as well be palpable—written in every line of his body language and underlined twice. “Will you?”

And Dick, somehow, can't even muster up a wisecrack to steal the last word.

 

* * *

 

The sheer amount of nothing he finds is paradoxically massive.

Everywhere he thinks to look, every thread he tries to pull, has been scrubbed clean and tied tight. No traceable connection digital or physical connecting Jason to the fire. Three of the men died in transit and the other two at the hospital a few hours later. Not a speck of evidence and not a single witness.

Dick loves a good challenge as much as the next guy, but Jason Todd's crimes are _immaculate,_ and it's _maddening_. He searches for weeks for something— _anything_ —and ends up with nothing in his laughably thin case file but notes to himself with nearly every one struck through with a line to rule it a dead end.

_Maddening._

The frustration keeps him working for far longer than he should, weeks past when he knows he should stop and put what little free time he has toward working on one of the so, _so_ many other things on his plate, not continuing to chase down increasingly hopeless leads whenever he gets a chance.

Additions to the unsolved pile are always frustrating, but Dick has had to learn how to lose over the years—to know when to let a case go cold to keep from distractions on more pressing matters in the present. There's nothing he can do about it now, and nobody seems to be able to to catch or hold Jason for his crimes, anyway, so no one is put in any _more_ danger by it going unsolved. It's way past time to throw in the towel. He knows this, and yet—

There's _something_ —a gut feeling that crops up after the twelfth friend of a friend turns out to know just as much nothing as the others. Something isn't right. It's there, leaving him feeling like a word he's forgotten is _just_ on the tip of his tongue, for over a week, gravitating back to this impossibly perfect crime, before he gets it and realizes just how doomed of an undertaking this was from the start.

Jason waiting around at the scene should have been a giant, waving red flag of suspicious activity, in retrospect. Dick should've realized then. He had to know burning people alive in the middle of Gotham would attract attention, and for what purpose? No way he found out about the plot the day of, not with this level of premeditation. He knew what they were planning weeks in advance—would've had to have talked his way onto their team, helped them plot, sabotaging from the inside. Why not just kill them before the day of rather than make such an ordeal of it? Sure, he's got dramatic tastes even by their standards, but, even if that was the case, why implicate himself?

With the lengthy head start he had and amount of _nothing_ Dick has found by way of evidence, there was no reason to stick around. There would've been nothing to tie him to the school if he hadn't allowed himself to be spotted. He wanted the connection to be made— _wanted_ to put someone on his trail so he could sit back and laugh watching them hit walls in the labyrinth he'd built of meticulously planned dead ends.

Jason might not be trying to actively kill them all anymore, but he's certainly not a fan. He's got an uncanny ability to press buttons, and he _loves_ doing it. If sees a chance to get under someone Batty's skin, he'll take it. He's been playing a game, and, as much as it pains him to admit, Dick's been had. Thoroughly.

There should be some kind of comfort in knowing this case was custom designed to be impossible to solve, that Jason must have planned this for months, doesn't quintuple check his every move at all times, and _does_ leave a traceable trail just like everyone else when he's not expecting Bat involvement (Dick cracks open everything Bruce has on Jason to be sure of that). But, instead, Dick gets stuck up on the fact he _can_ be this good. He can't get over it that, no matter how long it took him or how near impossible it would be to do again now that he's landed himself firmly on Dick's radar, Jason committed a crime Dick can't solve—a crime he would even go so far as to say no one could solve, arrogant as it makes him seem.

He makes it damn easy to forget just how smart he is under all the bluster and theatrics. Dick isn't sure how he managed to overlook this for so long, but he's forced to realize, now, that his mental picture of Jason has been _seriously_ outdated for a while now. If he wanted to, Jason Todd could easily be the most dangerous threat Dick has ever faced. It's more than a little troubling that he's only just now noticing it—that he let their short but rocky history blind him this much—and, even then, only because Jason all but sat him down and drew him a diagram.

It feels like he has a direct line into Dick's brain. He knows exactly how Dick thinks because he was trained to think the same way. Everything Bruce taught him, every last off the wall technique that would give Dick a leg up in a normal investigation, Jason was taught, too, and he's turned it all on its head, tracking down every tiny shred of evidence in the places he knows Dick will look and destroying it before he has the chance.

Dick has never had to deal with someone so like himself, and he didn't realize how good of a thing that was because he _hates_ this.

The idea of Jason knowing where his blind spots are, of him being able to get things past him like this—if he'd wanted to get away with this scot free, he could've, and Dick wouldn't have had a clue—it makes his skin crawl, gives him ridiculous urges. He spends a full day fighting the impulse to track Jason down and not let him out of his sight until he knows every in an out of his brain like Jason seems to know his—to study him until he can predict his every move and can stop sitting around wondering _if_ he could stop Jason if it came to that. He wakes up the next day wanting nothing but to get as far away from Jason as he can—to keep off his radar, associate with him as little as possible, and think of him even less.

Conflicted is the word.

Dick is conflicted.

 

He's waiting for a bus the next time they run across each other. Jason takes a seat under the awning, somehow managing to make such an unremarkable action intentionally annoying to no end at the speed he takes it. He crosses his legs with flair and smiles primly at Dick where he's taken up a white knuckled grip on the side of an advertisement for a bail bondsman whose number he should maybe be memorizing right about now.

It's the first time Dick has seen him without the helmet on since Jason was a kid, he realizes, and it's an oversight on his part, really. While he wasn't paying attention, the image of Jason in his head has become a mask instead of a face until it's far too late, and... well.

Dick would like to believe he's not the type of person to ever think of a child as _ugly_ , but he's not delusional, blind, or an amnesiac, and _that_ is sure as hell not how he thought Jason Todd's genetics would shake out.

There's really no other way to say it: he's gorgeous.

All the features that were just too _much_ in too small of a space when he was a kid have come together on his face like some kind of magic—striking cheekbones cut high and wide, jaw square, dark and messy curls with an eye-catching shock of white through his bangs, and full lips quirked in a cocky smirk to boot.

Stupid.

 _Another_ stupid slip up—twice, now he's been caught so off guard.

How is it possible Jason's made him feel like such a dumbass more over the past few days than most people have his entire life? He should've realized the bumbling teenage Jason memorialized in his head wouldn't be the same after all these years. He'd been so swept up in him and all his frustrations, he'd forgotten about aging—about _time_ —and, stupider still, when he stops reeling from the newest hole punched straight through his perceptions, he finds, somehow, all this newfound beauty just makes him _angrier_.

“How's the latest case going, Detective?” Jason asks perkily. “Anything updates I'd be interested to hear?”

 _Sunglasses,_ Dick thinks vindictively. _He's wearing sunglasses in the pouring rain._

He pushes a few wayward strands of hair from his face. “You know how it is,” he maintains an impassive tone and expression, “even the most petty of criminals get lucky sometimes.”

Jason's bravado barely wavers at such an admittedly weak jab—just a small tic at the corner of his mouth. “Well.” His left brow has a matching strip of bleached hair at its very edge when he quirks it above his frames. “One of us is certainly petty.”

The bus, with its usual impeccable timing, arrives just then, breaks squealing loud enough to excuse Dick from having to respond to that, and he's sure—completely, _absolutely_ sure—that Jason has no business anywhere this bus stops, yet he gets on right behind Dick. He tips the driver exactly twice as much as Dick does before settling down just far enough that Dick can't say a word to him without causing a scene but close enough so he can see the headline perfectly when he pulls out a days-old newspaper.

 _East Gotham Elementary Cafeteria Now Serving Just Deserts!_ the headline reads. _Poetic Justice For Sick Fiends!_

Jason wears a wide, self satisfied smile for the entire fifteen minute ride as he flips through the paper, turning pages with deliberate slowness, and Dick—

Dick takes the high road. He waits until they're both in costume to start throwing punches.

 

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes u just have super long conversations about characterization with people and end up digging up old fics to repost instead of sleeping  
> thanks for reading and in advance for any feedback! i dont really reply to comments but that doesnt mean i appreciate them any less! <3


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